Police had issued Hussain with the notice under section 49 of RIPA to force him to let the cops into his USB stick.

The judge said Hussain's deliberate refusal to comply with a police notice and hand over his password was a very serious matter because it served to frustrate a police investigation, the BBC reports.

Hussain was jailed for five years and three months last April for the far more serious offence of conspiring to take part in a planned attack on a Territorial Army base in Luton. Along with three other men, Hussain pleaded guilty to plotting to use a remote-control toy car to plant a homemade bomb at the TA centre. The suspects were arrested before any preparations for an attack were put together.

At the time Hussain was arrested in April 2012, police recovered a number of USB sticks and external storage devices. Another USB device, reportedly found during a later search, was encrypted and the security protection was strong enough to frustrate attempts to receiver the information the device contained even after the police brought in experts from NTAC (the National Technical Assistance Centre) at GCHQ.

Hussain told investigators that he was unable to remember the password because of the stress he was under in prison. Even being served with the section 49 notice, along with a deadline that expired last January, failed to jog his memory.

However, after police told Hussein's lawyers they had launched a fresh investigation into alleged credit card fraud by Hussain late last year, his memory suddenly improved. Hussain revealed that the memory stick's password was "$ur4ht4ub4h8", a play on words relating to a chapter of the Koran.

Curiously the password "turned out to be the same phrase from the Koran that Hussain had used before on other devices”, according to a reports on the sentencing by the Luton Dunstable Express.

At this point the police were able to access the memory stick, discovering it contained evidence useful for their inquiry into the alleged financial fraud rather than anything directly related to terrorism or national security.

Bootnote

*The circumstances of the case raise several unanswered questions, as security and privacy watchers at Spy Blog note: "Why didn't authorities try the same password on the 3rd USB device, which NTAC had found for first 2 USB devices? So "$ur4ht4ub4h8" is too strong to brute force, but surely there are Koran & Bible phrase attack dictionaries?"

Other security experts have expressed surprise that GCHQ was supposedly unable to brute-force a 12 character alpha-numeric password, given the resources at its disposal. UK IT professional and security blogger Quentyn Taylor writes:

https://t.co/1C8q5HYOXl claims that "$ur4ht4ub4h8" will take 2k years for a desktop PC... err were GCHQ even trying to crack it?